Starkville might be an odd place to find a 24-year-old Sudanese refugee turned Canadian. It is a complicated place with a complicated history, steeped in racial injustice, civil upheaval and social activism.
Sitting in the heart of Mississippi, some of its 25,000 residents live in affluent, mostly white neighbourhoods – huge homes with perfectly manicured lawns. Others in mostly Black communities, with run-down homes and where gun violence, drug and alcohol abuse are a concern.
It’s where Black people were lynched and publicly hanged well into the 1900s. In 1922, Starkville was the site of a large rally for the Ku Klux Klan. Up until the early 1980s there were still segregated schools. If you were Black, you knew there were parts of the city you just didn’t go to.
Starkville is a modest place, with a slower pace. Its downtown is one main street lined with ornate buildings, mostly inhabited by locally owned businesses. The local diner is packed on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
It’s a bubble. It is truly a bubble. You are protected. You’re taken care of.
There’s a small square that commemorates its Black history, with photos of prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., and where events like Juneteenth are celebrated.
It’s also the home of Mississippi State University, where there are nearly as many students enrolled as there are living in Starkville itself. Every fall the population doubles in size and becomes a bustling place until the summer heat settles in again.
Bulldogs is the mascot name for the athletic teams at MUS, and make no mistake, they run this town. You can buy anything Bulldog almost anywhere in town. There are state-of-the-art facilities on campus. The 63,000-seat Davis Wade Stadium is eye-popping. Dudy Noble Field is where the baseball team plays, where they pack upward of 16,000 fans in the stadium for games. Everywhere you turn, including the Mike Sanders Track and Field Complex, is immaculate.
And if you’re an athlete here, the locals adore you. You are treated differently, no matter where you come from or what you look like.
“Although I’m not too familiar with the rest of the state and everything that goes on outside of here, I know for me this definitely exceeded the expectations,” says Arop, whose comfort level has grown over the five years since first arriving in Starkville in 2018 to study computer science.
“It’s a whole community in itself, so you would never see the real Starkville,” says Yulanda Haddix, president of the local chapter of the NAACP and an MSU alum. She grew up here and knows the difference between what’s on campus and what exists outside its gates. “It’s a bubble. It is truly a bubble. You are protected. You’re taken care of.”
In those early days, Arop wouldn’t venture too far from home and ensured he was back in his space by nightfall. Even the backroads he runs down on the weekends or in the mornings he’d steer clear of unless with a group of people.
“I’ve never felt that this wasn’t a safe place for me. I think it could also be the person I am, and I think I’m very trusting of other people. But I’ve found nothing but respect and kindness from the community here,” he says.
Source Agencies
